


An E%ercise in Creativity

by K_G



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, F/M, Fluff, Meowrails, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, a horoscope inspired drabble
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 21:07:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1483984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/K_G/pseuds/K_G
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your moirail has organised an outing for you, to 'broaden your bumpkin horizons' as he puts it. You are less than thrilled by this. But if it makes him happy then you suppose you can go along with it. But really, who needs to learn how to *cook* their food?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nepeta: Be Purrstered

AC: :33 < equius no

CT: D --> Yes.

AC: :33 < no.

CT: D --> Nepeta

CT: D --> This is not up for discussion

CT: D --> You will dress appropriately and meet me are the required location tomorrow before the largest moon is at half-mast

CT: D -->  I will not be %ed in this

AC: :33 < *the huntress glares angrily up at her stubborn hoofbeast of a meowrail* this is – i mean “this is stupid,” *she hisses petulantly, before flicking her tail once and nodding her head* “but if will make you happy i guess i can do it.”

CT: D --> There will be no guessing, your reluctance is f00lish in the e%treme and I will not abide it

CT: D --> I have gone to a not inconsiderable amount of e%pense to organize this outing, and you will not resist me further

AC: :33 < i said yes!! stop purrsturing already or youre going to make yourself all gross and break your new husktop  :((

CT: D --> I am not ‘purrsturing’ in the slightest that is a ridiculous accusation

AC: :33 < yes you are

CT: D --> No I’m not

AC: :33 < yes you are!

CT: D --> No

AC: :33 < Yes!!!

CT: D --> No and you will stop

AC: :33 < i said yes and YOU will stop befurr i change my mind *ac frowns super hard and crosses her arms so equius will know she is being extra serious* i can go climb in the mountains and youll never ever be able to track me because youre a city troll

CT: D --> That

CT: D --> You

CT: D --> Fine

CT: D --> I am calm

AC: :33 < be calmfur

AC: :33 < *ac sits back on her haunches and tilts her head to one side* tell me how calm you are

CT: D --> I am as calm as a gentle and majestic hoofbeast at rest in a field

AC: :33 < what kind of furreld? field sorry that one didnt look right

CT: D --> It is a field with grasses of the most noble hue as far as the eye can see, rippling like the pectorals on the STRONGEST of all adult musclebeasts as it fle%s in a magnificent display

AC: :33 < okay thats purretty gross but go on

CT: D --> The breeze is c001 and dries the sweat from my skin and rustles my mane of hair in a manner most becoming

CT: D --> I % my legs and 100k up into the sky at twin moons, breathing slowly

AC: :33 < good! *ac joins you and curls up on your lap in a cute little ball*do you furreal better?

CT: D --> I do

CT: D --> Thank you

AC: :33 < <>

CT: D --> <>

CT: D --> I believe that you will enjoy yourself immensely once you arrive

CT: D --> It will be fun

CT: D --> I 100k forward to seeing you

AC: :33 < it will be furry nice to see you too *ac brightens up and bounces a few times to purrperly express her joy!!!*

CT: D --> I must go, we will speak tomorrow

AC :33 < okay :))

                                                                              

You set yourself to offline and put aside your tablet and pen to grab your hat, running your fingers along the soft fur over and over to settle your nerves. Pounce picks up on your anxiety, easing herself down from her favorite sleeping place at the rearmost point of your cave. Her huge feet make gentle papping sounds on the stone, the tip of her tail stained red as it swiped over one your palettes. You’d been doodling on the wall earlier before Equius messaged you. Now the blood was dry you won’t be able to shade it the way you wanted.

Your fingers grip your hat a little tighter, nibbling at your lower lip. Pounce butts your cheek with hers, her deep purr rumbling through both of your chests.

“I don’t want to go,” you say, tears prickling at your eyes. You close them so your lusus won’t see, because she gets all fussy when you cry and you don’t want to be fussed over any more than you already have been, and will be tomorrow. “I hope there will be somewhere to hide.”

Pounce lays down at your feet, and incidentally _on_ them, but you don’t mind even though she’s really really heavy. She always knows when you need time to just _be_. You lean over her, resting your chin on the back of her head for a moment.  
“I have to be beautyifful tomorrow Pounce. So Equihiss will be purroud of me and give me a break.”

Pounce mewed with her upper mouth in response. You blush and squeal, burying your face in her fur and nuzzling her ears. You are so bad at taking compliments.

You fall asleep like that, draped over your lusus. You know she’ll pick you up by the scruff of your shirt and put you in your recupracoon before you start to dream. 


	2. Bathtime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NSFW chapter art at the end.

You wake up covered in slime and with most of your hair stuck to the right side of your face. Some strands from your bangs have gotten caught on your mouth. You grimace and brush them away, before scrambling out of your recupracoon. You don’t like the floaty sensation, or the slimy feeling all over your body. If you didn’t have terrible dayterrors, you would go without the sopor slime entirely. You can’t understand why Gamzee likes it so much that he’d want to _eat_ it. Gross.

Pounce is nowhere to be seen, which means she’s out hunting for something you can take with you later. She’s so great. She knows you don’t have time to do it yourself, since you need to be _presentable_ and _civilised_ today.

Gross.

You do some stretches anyway, since you like to be limber and ready for anything at any moment, and your muscles ripple in a manner that your moirail would surely approve of. You wrinkle your nose at the thought of him being all approving over _your_ muscles. Double gross. You flick your hand repeatedly until every goblet of slime has been shaken off, and then head to the back of the cave for some supplies. You fill your favourite fur knapsack with some soap cakes you made last week from cholerbear fat, the dress you plan to wear, a rolled up barkfiend pelt and of course your trusty hat and tail. Then you put the whole thing in your syllabus and brush aside the foliage covering the entrance to your hive-cave. You don’t bother getting dressed, you’ll just get sopor all over everything and then you’d have to wash your clothes as well as yourself! You don’t have the energy for that _and_ a trip. With your super-sharp and lethal claws at the ready, you take off at a jog toward the watering-hole you’ve claimed as your own.

Your claim is enforced by the line of impaled undead staked at a sanitary distance from your primary water supply.

 One of the newest ones – you’ve nicknamed it Alvaed -  groans weakly at you as you approach, flailing its one, partially rotted arm at you. You leap up and give it a friendly hi-five as you pass.

Its hand flies off into the distant scrub. You giggle and shrug your shoulders at the zombie by way of apology. Alvaed’s jaw sort of bobs in a way you choose to interpret as an acceptance of your apology.

Alvaed is so great, you’ll be sad when it rots away to a skeleton and you won’t be able to see its pretty amber eye anymore.

You pause at the edge of the small body of water for breath, eyes darting around for any sign of movement. When your initial scan reveals nothing, you make yourself small, all bunched up shoulders and taut lines. You patrol the perimeter, stepping deftly between the violet clumps of grass and avoiding any twigs that might crack underfoot.

When you are quite certain that the area is clear of any threats, undead or otherwise, you uncaptchalogue your knapsack and leave it leaning against the rock-hard bark of the ancient tree that shades the area. You grab a soap cake and dive neatly into the pool. You leave barely a ripple behind, since without Pounce to stand on guard you don’t feel comfortable messing around in the water. You can hold your breath for quite a long time, and put that time to use scrubbing the layers of stubborn sopor crust off your skin. You emerge slowly, because as tempting as it is to throw your hair back so you can look statuesque in the gleam of the twin moons it’s just not worth the chance of alerting potential predators to your location.

You scrub the soap into your hair, working extra hard and checking a whole three times for cholerbear lice.  
Not that they’re hard to miss, being roughly the size of your first knuckle.  
But it doesn’t hurt to be thorough about these things when you’re planning to meet up with your moirail. You know he’ll check your hair with those long tweezers of his so that he won’t bruise your skull. Maybe he’ll let you braid his afterward. You like Equius’s hair, it’s so much longer than yours and always as soft and silky as Pounce’s fur.

Once you’re done you swim over to the other side of the small lake, cupping your hands and taking a drink. Some water spills back out of your mouth because of the pronounced cleft in your upper lip, but you are accustomed to this and do not pay the trickling sensation much mind.

You shake yourself off, and walk back to the tree to bend and retrieve the barkfiend pelt from your knapsack. It makes for a very good towel, not having much in the way of waterproofing. You make a mental note to pack your spare as a present for your perspiration-prone pale partner, and smile broadly as you imagine him burying his face in the soft fur and complaining about it having come from a real animal. He’s cute when he gets all huffy about ‘the preservation of Alternian fauna.’

A flash of white through violet has you scaling the tree in seconds, your claws finding grudging purchase in the crotchety bark as you haul your still-damp body into the canopy. You lay flat against a branch as thick as you are tall, and sigh a quiet sigh of relief as Pounce bounds into view.

Her ears flick back and forth for a moment, shooing off a buzzing insect, and then she lets out a harmonic double-mew of inquiry. You meow back at her, and she rolls onto her back, paws waving lazily. You laugh, wiggling your rear as you adjust yourself and then –

-          POUNCE!

You miss her on purpose, rolling a grand total of six times before straightening up. Your shoulder twinges uncomfortably. You might have pulled something when you tucked into a ball for the landing. Pounce murrs at you in concern, and one of her paws hooks around your waist. Her tongue is raspy enough to help you clean hides of sinew after you’ve skinned the owners, so she very gently flicks it over your sore shoulder. You squeal and kick your feet in a half-hearted protest. You have the best lusus ever, and you wish she could come with you tomorrow. You frown at the thought, but she doesn’t let you linger on negative feelings, pushing you in the direction of home.

 

                                                                             


	3. Pilgramage

You dress quickly after waking, and Pounce drags her rough tongue over your hair until it is sleek and shining against your head. You made your dress yourself, and you are very proud of the creative way you managed to include your sign in its design – it will be very important for it to be on prominent display when you arrive at the schoolfeedstem complex.  
That thought makes you anxious, and your sharp eyeteeth dig at your bottom lip while you worry about all the things that could go wrong. You aren’t good with crowds and the kind of socialisation that doesn’t allow you to pouncegreet anyone you take a shine too.

  
  
Your tablet-top is blinking blue at you, a sign of your moirails no doubt mounting impatience for you to check-in with him before leaving. You carefully fold yourself down into a cross legged sit so as not to wrinkle your dress too much, and open your trollian client to find a torrent of blue text waiting for you.  
This development does not surprise you in the least. You scroll down without really parsing any of the text on show, since the content follows a formula you know by rote, ‘you must not delay blah blah please ensure you mind your language blah blah.’ You wrinkle your nose, but your lips twitch upward at the edges in a fond smile. He worries so much about nothing, it’s really a shame he can’t learn to relax! But then if he did ever manage that, you wouldn’t pity him anymore, and that is intolerable to contemplate.  
You scrawl out a brief assurance that the layer of dirt ground into your impurrmeable hide will only be a whisker thick and that yes, you are leaving soon, and yes, Pounce will be taking you most of the way so you are sure to be there on time. Then you tell him to make sure he doesn’t short circuit his husktop with the amount of sweat that must be dripping on it, he’s in such a state, and call him a puss poor lusus stand-in because he forgot to remind you to chew some fresh breath leaves before you go.  
You make sure to add a diamond before closing your chat client, so he doesn’t get his towels in a twist over the ‘potential pitch impropriety’ of your last line. You smirk in satisfaction, picturing his complexion mottling for a moment in blue fury before smoothing out with a palestruck and slack expression as he adds his own diamond emote. You know exactly how to play him so he’s left wondering how you’ve managed to reach your sweep count. You are a veritable pale harlot, and are completely content with that knowledge.  
  
Pounce places one very heavy paw on your shoulder, the purr thrumming through your whole body as a reminder that you can actually see your moirail today if you get off your rear globes and get moving instead. You captchalogue your tablet-top and pluck an ambitious pincered strong-crawler off your leg, the thing flailing in distress for a moment before you put it out of its misery. The taste is a little acidic for your liking, but you aren’t about to let a snack go to waste. Then you throw yourself onto the back of your lusus, who meows with both of her mouths before setting off at a brisk lope out of your cave.  
Gripping tight with both your thighs, you throw your hands into the air with joy as the cool breeze that comes with motion ruffles your hair and brings a flush of olive to your cheeks. The twin moons are bright slivers of violet and green light as they begin their pass over the intimidating craggy peaks to the east, occasionally obscured by puffs of thin cloud that cast long shadows over the rippling grasses of the plains.  
Pounce knows her way around the area like no other creature, how to step over the marshy parts of the grasslands and where to leap over hidden scars in the earth – craters and crevasses left by ancient conflicts you’ve learned about from the drawings in the cave systems that link to yours. You know that many many sweeps ago, there was an attempt to overthrow the rule of the empress, and that it failed miserably. You know the artist who painted the depiction of the struggle was an olive-blood like you, because there were notations under the drawings scrawled messily in that hue in a version of Alternian that predates your own and frustrates you with its undecipherability. You found her dried out carapace, when you were a sweep younger and working on a map of your cave system in its totality. It made you so sad, seeing the mass of wirey white hair over wrinkled obsidian hide, and huge gently pointed horns that reminded you of your own. Her fingertips had been stained a nasty toxic yellow; still painfully bright after untold sweeps; that meant she had ensured she would not rise as an undead after her passing.  
You think that nameless artist was your ancestor. You wish you could read her stories in their entirety - Aradia had been helping you learn the dialect ages ago, before she became all distant and eerie and didn’t care to waste her time with you anymore.  
  
A sharp sting on your left rumblesphere, followed by an apologetic mraowl from Pounce de Leon, bought you out of your introspective musings with a couple of hurried blinks. The grasslands were behind you now, replaced instead by densely packed forest. The deep teal trunks of the tallwoods rose up higher than you could make out, and the canopy was only occasionally pierced by the faint light of the moons and stars.  
Your lusus’s fur suddenly goes wirey under your grasptwigs as she bristles, growling so low you almost can’t hear it, and you know that something big is watching you up there with predatory eyes. You uncaptchalogue your deterrent for these occasions, a huge fur cape assembled from very large and very unhappy kills from your past hunts, and you sling it over your shoulders. It slows Pounce down a little, and you struggle to keep your posture stiff and upright under its weight, but the neon fuzz does the job of warning prospective combatants that you can more than handle yourself and soon your lusus is purring reassurances at you, the danger has passed. Your sore shoulder twinges uncomfortably as you remove the cape, and your eyes water for a moment with the pain of motion.  
The journey takes a long time, and you’re glad that Pounce is going to wait for you rather than run all the way home. She crests a hill and stops, steam rising from her panting mouths as you both look down upon the loosely grouped ramshackle lawnrings. The terrain is rocky and inhospitable, some hives have been constructed on towering mesas connected by thin bridges, while others are built into the cliffside itself.  
  
You know that your moirail will look out for you while you are here, but your pupils contract sharply anyway at the sight of a trio of gargantuan white spindlestems plucking at dense webbing at the very bottom of the canyon. You do not want to think too hard about that lusus, or its custodial charge.  
Pounce lays down flat so you can dismount, and sensing your anxiety she butts her head against your hip.  
You might be afraid, but you are Nepeta Leijon, and you will not cower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pincered strong-crawler = ant  
> Grasptwigs - fingers  
> Tallwoods - trees  
> Spindlestems - insect legs


End file.
